Google Trends: Compare keyword search volume of different terms and see trends over time. One great feature is the ability to analyze audience trends to know if a particular topic’s audiences are growing or shrinking.

Google Adwords: Advertising keyword research tools for determining search volume, topical relevance and competition. The ability to know the competition for different keywords and groups will help inform whether or not it is feasible to use a particular phrase and rise to the top. Filling a site with a lot of very high volume and high competition terms will normally result in poor search rankings.

Google Webmaster: For existing sites this tool can be used to see how Google already categorizes your site. This is useful in making sure you’re not going to lower rankings by making changes.

Google Analytics: For existing sites this tool will let you know how users are already finding your content. This also allows you to make sure you don’t harm existing high rankings and to identify search trends on your site.

Facebook: Research what users are interested in around your area. Starting a fan page allows you to communicate directly with viewers directly online and see what they are interested in by viewing their profiles. You can also investigate local and regional groups to discover what topical interests are out there that you can provide content for and reach out to them.

]]>1214Easy Best Practices Guide for HTML Pageshttps://www.youneeditall.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-promotion-optimization-and-online-marketing/best-practices-guide-for-html/
Tue, 19 May 2009 21:38:54 +0000https://www.youneeditall.com/2009/05/19/best-practices-guide-for-html/Easy Best Practices Guide for HTML Pages Create unique, accurate page titles and use “title” tags A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each …

Create unique, accurate page titles and use “title” tags A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results Good practices for page title tags• Accurately describe the page’s content • Create unique title tags for each page • Use brief, but descriptive titles

Make use of the “description” tag A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two. Snippets appear under a page’s title and above a page’s URL in a search result. Good Practices for page description tags• Accurately summarize the page’s content – Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.• Use unique descriptions for each page• Make sure to keep the audience in mind when describing content

Use keywords in the page content The keywords you target should already be part of the page text content, but there are a few useful tips to increase search engine relevance: • Use keywords in the heading tags where appropriate. Ex: <h1>• Make sure keywords are used several times in the page text, but not overused.

Write better anchor text Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link, and is placed within the anchor tag <a href=”…”></a>. This text tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to. The better your anchor text is, the easier it is for Google to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.

Use the “alt” attribute on image tags Search engines cannot evaluate images. Using the “alt” attribute on images will give the search engine information about what image content is available on your site.

* Create links to other pages with the same keywords.
* Link to other pages using keywords in the file name.
* No orphaned or dangling pages
* Choose anchor text carefully.
* Who might benefits from links to your site?

How to Resubmit website to Google?

If your site has stopped showing in Google’s search results, there are some steps you can take to help reintroduce it to Google. From checking the site’s robots.txt file to submitting a reconsideration request, this video tells the story of one webmaster investigating his site’s disappearance from Google. codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34444
tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

How to Remove Your Web Site from Google Index?

More Search Engine Optimization Tips from various sources.

If you use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

Have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase and your title meta tag

Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank (part of the ranking algorithm).

Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

Your URL file extension doesn’t’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

If your site content doesn’t’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

What is Google Wave? – DOES NOT EXIST anymore.

Google Wave is an online software application product of Google, described as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”. It was first announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009.

How do I create anchor links?

Anchor links can help your visitors navigate sections of a long page by taking them directly to a particular area of the page. An anchor link consists of two parts:

The link code:

<a href="https://www.youneeditall.com/?p=887#myLink">Link</a>

The anchor code:

<a name="myLink">Anchor</a>

Note that the difference between the two links is the # symbol within the tag, as well as the <a name> tag. To create your anchor links:

First build your link code:

<a href="https://www.youneeditall.com/?p=887#myLink">Link</a>

(Note that this link features a # symbol within the tag, which tells the browser to link to a corresponding anchor tag named myLink.)

Now create your anchor link. Use the exact same name as in your link code:

<a name="myLink">Anchor</a>

Once again, this is not a normal link, because the link uses the word name instead of href. Which is important, because it tells the browser where to go when your first link is clicked.

To make your anchor tags work correctly, the word that appears in the quotes in the anchor and link tags must match. For example:

]]>1052Search engines marketing and Value of PageRankhttps://www.youneeditall.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engines-optimization/
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:01:55 +0000https://www.youneeditall.com/2008/01/23/search-engines-marketing/Your Website search engines marketing and Value of PageRank! Do it by YOURSELF!!! READ OUR TIPS PAGE FOR MORE… Keyword Selector Tool Meta Tag Creater In order to be successful on the Internet, you must submit your websites to the top search engines and directories. If you are doing nothing else, search engine placement and …

Do it by YOURSELF!!!

In order to be successful on the Internet, you must submit your websites to the top search engines and directories. If you are doing nothing else, search engine placement and keyword-related advertising can make up 80 to 90 percent of your traffic.

Submitting to 1000’s of “search engines” is not the way to get your website out there. Less than 100 websites receive 99% of the search traffic. The other thousand are harvesters of email addresses and use their submissions to find prospects for spam.

We have chosen the top 66 search engines in order to achieve maximum results. When you submit to these 66 search engines, search results will show up in hundreds of other engines. For instance, Google powers the AOL and many other search engines. Search listings in Google will show up in Yahoo as well. Why would you pay $299 to Yahoo when you can get listed in their directory by submitting to Google?

Most SEOs and analysts agree that PageRank (PR) toolbar is at most a rough indication of true PR and most assume that the Google is dependent on external links. This is a carryover from the past when PR was either totally or almost totally dependent on linking. AS SEOs and webmasters become aware that linking does not equate to high or higher PR they conclude that PR no longer has any value.

MSN probably places the least emphasis and is actively striving to improve search results based on semantics, content and other non-link factors.

Yahoo appears undecided and in an identity crisis resulting in erratic SERPs.

Google still places significant value on linking, but in an effort to eliminate artificial linking, Google has shifted focus from the link itself to a host of factors associated with linking.

I frequently read posts at various forums lamenting the loss of PageRank during Google PR updates. Most often webmasters and SEOs attribute the loss of PR to insufficient linking.

A Typical Responses

While useful content is good to have and much better for your users, there is not denying that the big three search engines all place significant weight on the number of links pointing to your site in their ranking algo’s. PR, while visually appealing, really has nothing to do with the way you rank. Most of the people who have posted in this thread so far have been spot on.

]]>1046Web Link Analysis and Google PageRankhttps://www.youneeditall.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-promotion-optimization-and-online-marketing/google-pagerank-and-link-analysis/
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:34:09 +0000https://www.youneeditall.com/2008/01/23/google-pagerank-and-link-analysis/Google PageRank and Link Analysis Link Analysis and Google PageRank No single element is more important to a Web page’s Google ranking than the perceived quality of the links that point to the page — the so-called back links. It is crucial to understand that Google cares less about the quantity of the back links …

No single element is more important to a Web page’s Google ranking than the perceived quality of the links that point to the page — the so-called back links. It is crucial to understand that Google cares less about the quantity of the back links than about the quality of each individual link. The link quality is determined by reviewing the importance of the site that contains the link.Google does not disclose the specifics of its ranking algorithm to the public. However, the Google Web site states the following:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the Web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Thus: As you get more quality links pointing to your site, your PageRank will increase.The bottom line is that effective link building is critical to gaining an opportune Google ranking. Convincing a number of “important,” topic-similar Web sites to link to yours ultimately will prove more useful than any other technique to optimize your site. The tricky part, of course, is to figure out which sites you would like to link to yours and, more important, how to convince their owners to do so.Effective link building requires patience and persistence. Lots of it. The first step in the link building process is to find out which links are currently pointing to your site. To do so:Go to the Google Web site.Type in “link:”+ your Web site URL.Click “Google Search.Google will list your Web site’s back links.If you are using the Google browser toolbar, you can check the back links by pointing your browser to your Web site; then select the “Backward Links” option from the site information drop-down menu.You should then visit and review the content and PageRank of some of the sites that point to yours. That will enable you to determine whether or not the current back links are beneficial to your site’s Google ranking.The next step in the link building process is to build more of them. To do so, put together a list of Web sites you’d like to link to yours. The best way to compile such a list is to peruse a number of Web sites with somewhat similar content to that of your site. You can locate such sites by typing into Google a search phrase that ideally would return your site as a high-ranking result. The returned list of matches will provide you with a number of sites that you can review. Generally, the best-ranked matches are the ones that are most likely to generate the most effective links to your site. Having perused the results, the next step is to visit the sites and convince their administrators to provide the desired links.There is, of course, no guarantee that a particular Web site will add a link to your site. There may be many reasons why a Web site owner might decline to do so. For example, the site might refuse to link to an obviously competing online location. Or, the site’s owner may not be interested in being affiliated with other sites. Another reason could be that the site is already providing several outbound links and is not interested in adding to the count. In such cases you will have to request links from someplace else.To request a link from another site you should compose and send a formal request to the targeted Web site’s owner or administrator and explain why providing a link would be mutually beneficial. If applicable, reciprocal linking can be offered as an incentive. In fact, you might promote your case by linking to the targeted site before requesting a link the other way. That way, you will prove to the Web site owner that you are serious about exchanging links. Still, if your request is turned down it is better to move on to the next Web site on the list and request a link from there instead.There is no exact way to determine how many back links one should actively pursue. The quality and link text of the obtained links largely determine when you have reached your target. The fact that a page has a higher PageRank does not necessarily mean that it has more inbound links than a page with a lower PageRank. In fact, the higher-ranking may have fewer back links than the lower-ranking one. The impact of the back links depends on the PageRank of their originating pages. Thus, a small number of links from high-ranking pages might prove more effective than a higher number of links from lower-ranking pages.Keep in mind that Google optimization will be an ongoing project for your Web site. Thus, you do not necessarily have to obtain all of your desired links at once. In fact, as quality back links are added to your site, the site will improve its visibility on the Web and you will be in a still stronger position to gain favorable linking.In addition to the PageRank of the originating site of a back link, Google will review the link text of each back link: Back links tell Google how important a page is; inbound link text might tell Google why the linking page considers the receiving page important. In essence: If a given search phrase appears in a back link’s text, then that back link will tend to prove more helpful to the receiving page’s ranking.Although link building can be a lengthy process you should not give in to the temptation of joining a link farm or any other similar type of link-generating activity. The obtained links will account for little, if anything, in Google’s assessment as their originating sites are unlikely to rank high or mirror the topic/theme of your site. Furthermore, Google might go as far as penalizing sites that appear to be engaged in link-farming activities. In short: Your time will be better spent trying to build quality links from quality sites.As for the outbound links you place on your Web site, Google will pay little to them — unless those links point to something Google finds objectionable — when determining a page’s ranking. Still, you should make sure to arrange those links in a clear, logical manner so that visitors can easily find them. Also, if you have made reciprocal-linking agreements with other Web site owners, then those owners will appreciate that your links to their sites are displayed nicely and prominently on your site. It is recommended that the number of links on a given page does not exceed 100.